


radio orphan annie's secret society

by xXstaystillXx



Category: My Chemical Romance
Genre: Alternate Universe, M/M, Sibling Incest, Subtext, except they arent related in this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-15
Updated: 2020-03-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:47:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,775
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23134879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xXstaystillXx/pseuds/xXstaystillXx
Summary: He rolls over; his fingers find the ends of your hair."You've got split ends," and the way he says it, soft in his mouth, makes you think it's something he picked up from the girls teasing each other at school.
Relationships: Gerard Way/Mikey Way
Comments: 2
Kudos: 20





	radio orphan annie's secret society

**Author's Note:**

> haha what if gw and mw were neighbors in an apartment building and mikey was like 13 wouldnt that be crazy

You’ve got a hand shoved in the loose cushy tent of your sweatpants, and you’re just getting into it— rocking your hips a little, hearing those bedsprings squeak and bitch underneath your fat ass— when Mikey does his Woody the Woodpecker signal on the other side of the wall, _tap-tappa-tap-tap-tap_ , and scares the shit out of you. 

You go "Fuck," under your breath, try and school your harsh breathing, stop the shaking in your arms. You guess you should’ve seen it coming; he only ever wants to ditch after the front door of his apartment slams, and you can hear it through the wall easy as pie— can hear his big ol’ stormcloud of a daddy start to yell at him, too, sonofabitch makes a loud entrance— and usually, you get your shit together before he even knocks, go orbit around the balcony door and wait to see him climbing over the railing. 

Usually, but not tonight. Tonight you’d already gotten a good leaf-through one of Frankie’s crumpled playboys from his stupid sticky-paged treasure trove (he leaves them under the couch cushions like you didn't find that shit hiding place the same day you moved in) when you heard the door slam next door, and— and you don't know. You figured you could get yourself off before he got smoked out, maybe, if you were quick, but it never takes that long for him to skitter over to your place; he's like a honeybee in that stormcloud, buffeted and tumbling around and choking on the fog and God, this is a weird thought process to have while you’ve still got ahold of your spit-wet dick. 

There’s another little sharp _tappa-tappa_ , done with the skinniest points of his knuckles, it has to be.

“Juss’a sec,” you mutter, turned so your lips almost press the paint. You want to finish but you know the kid’s gotta have his ear against the paperthin wall, listening for your return signal— not that you really have one, the mail-order catalog morse code is all him but you’re not gonna pop his bubble— and, well, in the past he's given you shit about hearing you whack off; says it so wicked, _y’sure go oh-god a lot, dude,_ so you stare at the old puke-stain splattered on the lefthand baseboards of your room and think about dead puppies, roadkill bursting in the heat until your dick calms down enough to be sociable. 

You roll out of bed and pad to the sliding glass door, except, wait, no; you're halfway there when you've gotta double back and snag your ¾ smoked pack of cigarettes from the kitchen counter, right next to the flea-market candy-dish where you keep your keys, a smattering of toothpicks and random pills (Frankie's; he sheds them like dandruff all over the fucken' place, you're pretty sure if you held him by his ankles and shook him it'd look like hail from a junkie's wet dream). 

The kid's already out there, of course. He just about gives you a heart attack every time he pulls this stunt— climbs like a deranged spider monkey across the railing between your balconies, six stories up like it's nothing, trying to work his way around the cinderblock partition one step at a time— and he figured out pretty early on if he doesn't get all the way over before you come out, you'll stand an inch away with your hands palm-up and tell him to be careful about a million times, practically dripping sweat even though he's the one flirting with the drop (and you can't really blame yourself; he did slip, once, only for a second but you saw the whiteout of fear on his face, his foot dip too-far down, his hands stutter, and ended up dragging him over the railing by the hood of his sweatshirt; it half-choked him, knocked the hell out of his elbows and knees, but as soon as he was on solid ground he shook with his head in your chest for three minutes, weak-jointed and high on adrenaline, so— y'know— you don't feel like _complete_ shit for banging him up). 

"Hey," he says, smiling closemouthed. No glasses, but still wearing his jeans— the ones with the knees sloppily put out, like he distressed them with a kitchen knife— even though it's almost eleven 'o clock.

"We ought to drag the beanbag out here," you say, in lieu of greeting. You're a little worried he's gonna start ribbing you for cranking one out if you don't distract him quick; you weren't— aren't ever exactly quiet, whatever, somebody better sue you. "I'm getting sick of sitting on concrete. Ass-freezer." 

"Wait— Frankie's beanbag? The giant one in your room?" he says, his face all lit-up.

You raise your eyebrows at him, try to keep a straight face. "Damn, don't sound so excited. I know for a fact he's blacked out and pissed himself on that thing. Really— it's a bad idea— I'm sure you don't want to."

He's already shouldering past you into the apartment like he owns the place. You laugh and smack for the back of his head— he swats your hand away, turns around and jogs backward, about to trip over the coffee table, still talking, "Everything here smells like fucking piss anyway, Gee, you think I'm gonna miss taking a trip to beanbag town without Frankie glaring down my neck? Hell no," and then he does almost trip but you've caught up enough to haul him upright by his sleeve. 

It's a two-person job to drag that godforsaken beanbag out there; it's unreasonably big, Oswald-blue, probably older than Mikey and spotted with burns no bigger than a single flake of ash. You weren't serious earlier, you haven't seen Iero piss himself since college, but— as you get real acquainted with it, your face grinding into the fabric while Mikey tugs too hard and wobbles under the weight of his end— you think you may have been onto something because it smells like a litterbox.

"That sucked," you say, after you get the thing crammed through the door and laid-out on the balcony, "really tried your damndest to run me into every wall you saw, huh?"

"Gotta keep up." He's not even winded, looks like a grinny little soap bubble bouncing around on his heels; he gives you the finger all whip-quick and sweet and collapses into the beanbag with his whole self. 

You settle down next to him and give yourself a second to feel old and out of shape. His bony angles and lines jab into your side; you pretend it doesn't make your skin crawl for a few reasons (and hope— surreptitiously— that he doesn't notice your right hand shoved in your pocket; it's awkward, but his bare arm is pressed real close and some part of you is convinced if he comes in contact with the hand you were jacking off with he'll know, and he'll think it's on purpose, and you will lose him. The things you're concerned about nowadays).

" 'S nice," he says. He rolls over; his fingers find the ends of your hair. 

"You've got split ends," and the way he says it, soft in his mouth, makes you think it's something he picked up from the girls teasing each other at school. 

"Hey, now," you say, "I caught you going at your bangs with my razor, like— a week ago."

He grins. "It's different when it's on purpose." He's so close you can see his tear ducts, little pin-prick holes on his bottom eyelid like someone slipped and poked him where they shouldn't have. 

"Say whatever you want, we match." You want to reach out and tug on his honeybrown fringey bangs but you don't. "Pretty sure that's my shirt too, actually— you going for a mini-me kinda look, or what?"

A snort, but maybe he turns a little pink. "No way, you're like, Darth Vader but lame. I'll pass." 

"Fucking mean," you say, fake-pouting, and you’re about to give him more shit— something something girly haircut something something— when he holds up a finger and stops you.

"Hold on," he says, "hold still." His twiggy hand, carved out of pale unstained wood— something soft, maybe balsa, model airplanes, huffable glue— comes up to your face. You freeze, hold your breath. If you move you will scare him away. 

The beanbag creaks underneath him. "Actually, I don't know if— how can you even see with all this shit in your face?" and his balsawood fingers with their white-chipped nails are pushing the strings of hair away from your eyes, and it scares you, a little, that target; means he was staring at your eyes as you were staring at his and marveling at his tiny perfect tear ducts. 

"Here," he says, once he's picked and cleared the strands of hair off your face, gently grazing your cheekbone and nose and eyebrows the whole time, and you feel greasy and unwashed and, well, stringy, not wanting him to touch any part of you and become dirtier for it, "Eyelash. Make a wish." 

His balsa-wood fingertip pecks below your eye, pulls back like a woodpecker giving an Eskimo kiss, and yeah; there's a black sickle-sliver stuck to it, but you don't wish on it, can't make yourself. 

He sits back. Despite the early-spring chill you can feel the sweat starting to prick underneath your arms, where they're pressed hot to the sides of your body, suffocating in your hoodie and you’re not, not sick with nerves yet, but getting there; he seems entirely unbothered. 

Your eyelash gets flicked over the balcony in the way of his cigarette butts. You remember that urban legend about pennies dropped off the empire state building— you're not high up enough to kill anyone, not even close, but maybe light their hair on fire if the butt's still smoldering and they wear a lot of hairspray, if it's a really, really good shot, a once-in-a-lifetime bullseye. 

You think about it a little bit; Mikey smoking a cigarette down to the filter— he always does, and you watch him grimace whenever he sees an inch-or-so of unsmoked cigarette lying on the sidewalk, wedged into the cracks, and you remember being that age and wanting to pry up those wasted butts and smoke the rest of them and you silently thank God for the passage of time— and flicking it over the balcony, his unperfect aim, the way he absently chew the dry thin skin off his lips and squints when he's trying really hard to concentrate (which you wish you saw more often than when he's pitching cigs, like maybe when he's at your flypaper-sticky Formica table doing overdue schoolwork, or something good-for-him like that), and throwing, and it soaring and landing in some lady's bouffant. In your head the camera trains on the butt; the backdrop, the building is a greyredblack motion smear, but that delicate little piece of trash is so in-focus you can see Mikey's front-teeth bitemarks imprinted, and then the scene cuts to Bouffant Lady running down the street screaming and trailing smoke. Cartoonish, not tragedy, even if there's fear on her not-real face.

"Mikes." You've drifted onto your backs— staring at the sky as if light pollution staining the cloud cover orangey-grey is the hot ticket show of the evening— but when you say his name his head snaps right back over to you. You say, "Ever heard of spontaneous human combustion?" except you fuck up on _spontaneous_ , it comes out ' _tainyuhs_ like you're a fucking hick. 

His brows crinkle. Some sort of siren starts up halfway across the city, distance making it buzzy and high as tinnitus. 

"Uh, I think so," he says, which means he won't admit he hasn't heard of it, but he still wants you to tell him about it; he did the same thing with Francis Bacon and _Polybius_ and countless other morbid little stories you can't stop yourself from telling.

Figuring if there was ever a time to do it, you shake another cigarette out of the pack one-handed and bring it to your lips; Mikey raises his hand expectantly. You want to cut him off— kid's too young to be chainsmoking at your pace— but you don't, you pick up one of the cigarettes that went rolling across the concrete when you dropped the pack and pass it to him. He takes it without a thank-you; vaguely, weirdly, you think you should take the one already hanging out of your mouth and snap it in half and share it with him instead, as if cigarettes work like too-big diner platters and bars of chocolate. 

You time flicking the lighter to your first word, adding a little impact, you guess, talking out of the side of your mouth. "So— someone'll just be sitting in their house, reading the paper or something, yeah?" Inhale, exhale, the dogshit fucking taste of smoke filling your mouth, both repulsive and comforting. 

He nods, and goes "dude," and you realize you kept ahold of the lighter, and you want to lean over so he can light his off of your cherry— what do they call that, butt kissing? something with the word fag in it?— but you don't. You give him the lighter, listen to his thumbnail scrape the wheel (he does it too hard and a flake of keratin comes up; he sighs like he was expecting it). 

"And they'll light on fire."

"Serious?"

"Serious. Only them, too, never their house— you like, see the photos, and there's always this huge scorch mark surrounded by un-burnt shit. Sometimes there's a foot with no body," you say, and as you do you knock the side of his shoe with yours, but fuck, you wish you hadn't; now you've got an image of his foot in his red Walmart sneaker, on its side in a puddley circle of ash just big enough for him to stand in, sock still on and slouched low past the heel, little pinkish blisters showing.

He whistles, or tries to— he really can't, just puckers his lips and blows, hums the wolf-whistle sound effect from a cartoon, flicking spit as if it'll fool anybody— then he smiles and the gap left by his last baby tooth flashes at you like it always does. "Damn, dude."

"Right?" The picture shifts, changes to his arm charred-off at the elbow, cigarette still between his fingers but burned down to a lacy grey column above the filter.

You take another drag to do something with your hands. It tastes better the second time, like your tongue is going numb.

" 'S kinda cool as shit, though," he says.

You go _Mhm,_ gaze up at the not-stars. "Nobody knows why. They just burn up," you say, and you catch yourself glancing at him, somehow still having to look down even though you're both flat on your backs; he's got this look on his face like he's bored, but not in a bad way, and you guess you could call that content but he wears _bored_ better than any 13-year-old you know (and you wince, a little, deep in your chest, 'cause you don't know any other 13-year-olds).

You wish he hadn't plucked an eyelash off your face already. You weren't planning anything, you're not going to do anything, but, well— this light, the dull greeny bleedout from a lamp left on inside eking through the glass door, it pools and shifts on his soft-edged face and makes him look like some sort of baby animal, maybe, a halfgrown wild thing still slick with down, and you want to reach out and touch the single, wobbly, barely-there freckle on the side of his nose, but— he used up your excuse to touch him, wasted it on you, so you don't. 

You try and scoot to the side, give him a little more room because even with your ass hanging off the edge you're taking up all the space. He looks over; every move you make is announced by the plasticy beanbag fill rubbing together and squeaking.

"What's up?" he asks, and you look away, guilty, the tip of your pointer finger buzzing.

"Just thinking."

He takes a drag; it feels obscene to watch him do it.

"You're a weirdo," he says, without knowing how right he is.

"Yeah, and you're a little creep."

"Loser."

"Pipsqueak."

"Freakazoid."

"Fag," you say, and he squawks like you knew he would, and you grin at him; you don't have the heart for it but you do anyway because he's gonna bump your shoulder hard, he's gonna smile back.

**Author's Note:**

> for my darling beautiful angel baby scooby whos name will be removed from this if she prefers i dont oust her 
> 
> \+ theres art for this au. i am the worst. [1](https://twitter.com/xXstaystillXx/status/1236037918336131075?s=19) [2](https://twitter.com/xXstaystillXx/status/1237497306984976384?s=19l)


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